RAND Reading Study Group Panel Members

JANICE DOLE is currently an Associate Professor of Reading Education at the University of Utah. After several years as a primary-grade teacher, Dole completed her M. A. and Ph. D. at the University of Colorado. Subsequently, she held positions at the University of Denver, the Center for the Study of Reading at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Michigan State University. Dole's work has appeared in the Reading Research Quarterly, Review of Educational Research, The Elementary School Journal, and the Journal of Reading. She is currently on the Reading Development Panel for the National Assessment of Educational Progress and has worked for the Research and Development section of the American Federation for Teachers for the last five years. Three years ago, Dole took a leave of absence from the University to work for the Utah State Office of Education. There she served as the Director of the Governor's Literacy Initiative for Utah, and directed a successful proposal for the Reading Excellence Act. She now serves as co-director of that project in Utah. Her current research interests include comprehension instruction at the K-3 level and reading professional development for K-3 teachers in at-risk schools.

JACK M. FLETCHER, Ph.D., is a professor in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Texas-Houston Heath Science Center, and Associate Director, Center for Academic and Reading Skills. For the past 20 years, Dr. Fletcher, a child neuropsychologist, has completed research on many aspects of the development of reading, language, and other cognitive skills in children. He has worked extensively on issues related to learning and attention problems, including definition and classification, neurobiological correlates, and most recently, intervention. He collaborates on several grants on reading and attention, including a multi-disciplinary grant funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the U.S. Department of Education, and the National Science Foundation under the Interagency Educational Research Initiative. Dr. Fletcher is also Principal Investigator or Co-Principal Investigator on NIH-funded research projects involving children with brain injuries, including a program project on spina bifida. Dr. Fletcher served on and chaired the NICHD Mental Retardation/Developmental Disabilities study section and is a former member of the NICHD Maternal and Child Health study section. He chaired a committee on children with persistent reading disability for the Houston Independent School District (HISD) and served on a task force on reading for HISD that produced a report widely cited within the state of Texas as a model for enhancing reading instruction in elementary school children. Dr. Fletcher has received several service awards from local school districts. Dr. Fletcher is part of a large consortium of investigators from the University of Houston, University of Texas-Houston, University of Texas-Austin, and California State University-Long Beach that recently received a program project grant involving the development of literacy skills in Spanish-speaking and bilingual children under the recent NICHD/Department of Education Bilingual Research Initiative.

GEORGIA EARNEST GARCÍA is Associate Professor and Associate Head of the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She holds a zero-time appointment in the Department of Educational Policy Studies and is a faculty affiliate with the Latina/Latinos Studies Program. A former Title VII Bilingual Education Fellow, she obtained her Ph.D. in Education from the University of Illinois in 1988. She currently teaches courses in reading, bilingual education/ESL, sociolinguistics, and multicultural education. Her research focuses on the literacy development, instruction, and assessment of students from culturally, linguistically, and economically diverse backgrounds, with much of her current research focusing on bilingual reading. She has published her work in the American Educational Research Journal, Anthropology and Education Quarterly, Review of Research in Education, Reading Research Quarterly, and Journal of Literacy Research. She was named a College of Education Distinguished Scholar in 1997, and awarded the Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching, Advising, and Research by the Council of Graduate Students in Education in 1993. Dr. García was a Senior Research Scientist at the Center for the Study of Reading for six years. She currently serves on the Board of Directors for the National Reading Conference.

IRENE W. GASKINS, a school administrator and founder of Benchmark School, is above all a teacher and instructional leader. Throughout her career she has been involved in many aspects of reading education. Gaskins taught in the public schools in Virginia and Pennsylvania. In 1965 she received her masters degree in Reading Education from the University of Pennsylvania and became a research assistant in the Reading Clinic there. As a research assistant she tracked the characteristics and progress of struggling readers in Penn's dyslexia study. This experience piqued Gaskins' interest in bright children who have great difficulty learning to read. Her dissertation research addressed this topic. Stints as a district reading consultant, college teacher, and consultant with a publishing company were followed by Gaskins receiving her doctorate in Educational Psychology in 1970 from the University of Pennsylvania. Sparked by her interest in children who have profound difficulties in learning to read, Gaskins founded Benchmark School in Media, Pennsylvania in 1970. Gaskins designed Benchmark not only to be a special school for helping struggling readers, but she also wanted it to be a laboratory for designing instruction that works for all students. Collaborating with her energetic and dedicated faculty, as well as major consultants from around the country, Gaskins has worked on such significant problems as designing word recognition instruction that works for students who previously made little progress in this area, improving reading performance by increasing students' awareness and control of cognitive styles and other personal factors that impact on reading, and designing programs that teach strategies for understanding and learning from texts. During the years 1988-1994 the strategies research at Benchmark was funded by the James S. McDonnell Foundation and Benchmark was the Foundation's National Demonstration School. One of the parts of her job that Gaskins likes most is being the teacher, or co-teacher, who pilots and fine tunes the new programs being developed at Benchmark. The results of this work have been published in journals such as The Reading Teacher, Reading Research Quarterly, Journal of Reading Behavior, Language Arts, Elementary School Journal, Remedial and Special Education, and Journal of Learning Disabilities.

ARTHUR C. GRAESSER is a full professor in the Department of Psychology and an adjunct professor in Mathematical Sciences at The University of Memphis. He is currently a co-director of the Institute for Intelligent Systems and director of the Center for Applied Psychological Research. In 1977 Dr. Graesser received his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of California at San Diego. Dr. Graesser's primary research interests are in cognitive science and discourse processing. More specific interests include knowledge representation, question asking and answering, tutoring, text comprehension, inference generation, conversation, reading, education, memory, expert systems, artificial intelligence, and human-computer interaction. His primary interest in reading focus on deeper levels of comprehension, such as inference generation, questioning, summarization, rhetorical organization, and pragmatics. He is currently editor of the journal Discourse Processes, and on the editorial board of Journal of Educational Psychology, Journal of the Scientific Studies of Reading, Cognition & Instruction, Applied Cognitive Psychology, Poetics, and the International Journal of Speech Technologies. In addition to publishing over 200 articles in journals and books, he has written two books and has edited six books.

JOHN GUTHRIE is a professor of Human Development at the University of Maryland at College Park. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in Educational Psychology. From 1992 to 1997 he was Co-Director of the National Reading Research Center (NRRC), which conducted studies of skilled reading, writing, and knowledge development. His current research addresses cognitive and motivational processes in learning conceptual knowledge from text among elementary students. Based on this work, he developed an engagement model of classroom context, processes of engagement in reading, and reading outcomes. From the model, he developed Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction (CORI) and conducted quasi-experiments showing that this intervention increases reading comprehension, reading motivation and science knowledge. He has performed structural equation modeling to show that reading engagement (e.g., cognition and motivation) mediated the effects of instruction on reading strategies and knowledge outcomes. His studies are published in peer-reviewed research journals. He currently holds two grants from the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) for secondary analyses of NAEP data examining reading instructional effects on reading achievement. He served on the expert panel for the Reading Excellence Act in 1999-2000. He was a member of one National Reading Council (NRC) committee that monitored the development of the Voluntary National Tests, and a second NRC committee that conducted a study of common metrics for reading achievement in 1998-2000.

MICHAEL L. KAMIL is Professor of Education at Stanford University. He is a member of the Psychological Studies in Education Committee and is on the faculty of the Learning, Design, and Technology Program. His research explores the effects of a variety of technologies on literacy and the acquisition of literacy in both first and second languages. He has worked extensively in schools, reading clinics, and other learning environments to determine the appropriate balance between applications of technology and the demands of literacy. One current line of research involves a comparison of processes used by adults in reading hypertext and conventional texts. This work is being extended to similar work with young children. He is also conducting instructional research focusing on the uses of expository text for reading instruction in first and second grade. The results suggest a benefit over other instructional methods that are based almost exclusively in story or narrative text. He is a co-editor of the Handbook of Reading Research, Vols. 1, 2, and 3 and has been editor of Reading Research Quarterly and Journal of Reading Behavior. For the past two years he has been a member of the National Reading Panel, producing a synthesis of instructional research in reading. He chaired the National Reading Panel subgroups working on Comprehension, Technology, and Teacher Education.

WILLIAM NAGY received his PhD in linguistics from the University of California, San Diego. He spent 18 years at the Center for the Study of Reading at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and since 1996 has been a professor of education at Seattle Pacific University, where he teaches graduate courses in reading. His interests include vocabulary acquisition and instruction, the role of vocabulary knowledge in first- and second-language reading, and the contributions of metalinguistic awareness to learning to read. His research has focused primarily on incidental word learning from context during reading, bilingual students' recognition of cognate relationships between English and Spanish, the acquisition of English derivational morphology and the role of morphology in word learning and reading comprehension, and the role of morphological awareness in the literacy development of children learning to read in China. He recently contributed a chapter on vocabulary acquisition processes to Volume III of the Handbook of Reading Research.

ANNEMARIE SULLIVAN PALINCSAR is the Jean and Charles Walgreen Jr. Chair of Literacy, Associate Dean for Graduate Affairs, and a teacher educator at the University of Michigan in the Educational Studies Department. Her research has focused on the design of learning environments that support self-regulation in learning activity, especially for children who experience difficulty learning in school. Her initial research (with A. Brown) was the design and investigation of reciprocal teaching dialogues to enhance reading comprehension with middle school students. Subsequent research focused on the use of this instruction to introduce primary-grade children to comprehension monitoring as they were learning to read. With co-principal investigator, C.S. Englert, she conducted four years of research, working with special educators, to design literacy curricula and instruction that would engage special education students in using oral, written, and print literacy to accelerate their literacy learning. In current research, conducted with science educator, S.J. Magnusson, she studies how children use literacy in the context of guided inquiry science instruction, what types of text support children's inquiry, and what support students who are identified as atypical learners require to be successful in this instruction. Palincsar served as a member of the NRC's Council on the Prevention of Reading Difficulty in Young Children, the National Education Goals Panel, the Schooling Task Force of the MacArthur Pathways Project, and the National Advisory Board to Children's Television Workshop.

CATHERINE SNOW is the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She received her Ph.D. in psychology from McGill and worked for several years in the linguistics department of the University of Amsterdam. Her research interests include children's language development as influenced by interaction with adults in home and preschool settings, literacy development as related to language skills and as influenced by home and school factors, and issues related to the acquisition of English oral and literacy skills by language minority children. She has co-authored books on language development (e.g., Pragmatic Development with Anat Ninio) and on literacy development (e.g., Unfulfilled Expectations: Home and School Influences on Literacy, with W. Barnes, J. Chandler, I. Goodman & L. Hemphill), and published widely on these topics in refereed journals and edited volumes. Snow's contributions to the field include membership on several journal editorial boards, co-directorship for several years of the Child Language Data Exchange System, and editorship of Applied Psycholinguistics. She served as a board member at the Center for Applied Linguistics and a member of the National Research Council Committee on Establishing a Research Agenda on Schooling for Language Minority Children. She chaired the National Research Council Committee on Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children, which produced a report that has been widely adopted as a basis for reform of reading instruction and professional development. She currently serves on the NRC's Council for the Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, and as president of the American Educational Research Association. A member of the National Academy of Education, Snow has held visiting appointments at the University of Cambridge, England, Universidad Autonoma in Madrid, and The Institute of Advanced Studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and has guest taught at Universidad Central de Caracas, El Colegio de Mexico, Odense University in Denmark, and several institutions in The Netherlands.

DOROTHY S. STRICKLAND is the State of New Jersey Professor of Reading at Rutgers University. She is past president of both the International Reading Association and the Reading Hall of Fame. Her research and practice interests include: early literacy learning and teaching in classrooms from preschool through the middle school years; early intervention policy and practice from prekindergarten through grade three; focused intervention at the upper elementary and middle school levels; and the special needs of low achieving poor and minority children. Current activities related to the work of the Reading Group include membership on several teacher standards boards: National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, Middle Childhood/Generalist Committee; ETS/Praxis Reading National Advisory Committee; INTASC/Council of State School Officers Panel on Reading. She was a panel member of the report Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children and is now working on a funded project to articulate teacher standards from prekindergarten through grade four with the design and implementation of appropriate and consistent teacher education. Relevant publications include: The Administration and Supervision of Reading Programs; Emerging Literacy, Language, Literacy, and the Child; Teaching Phonics Today; Beginning Reading and Writing; and three chapters in press on classroom intervention for low achieving students, one of which focuses on low-performing African American children.

FRANK R. VELLUTINO is a Professor of Psychology at the University at Albany, State University of New York. He currently holds joint faculty appointments in the Department of Psychology (Cognitive Psychology Program), the Department of Educational and Counseling Psychology, and the Program in Linguistics and Cognitive Science of the Department of Anthropology. He is also Director of the Child Research and Study Center, a research and student training center. He currently teaches a graduate course in children's learning that emphasizes intellectual, perceptual, memory, and language development, as well as a graduate seminar in human development that focuses on the relationship between language and cognitive development. His research has been concerned with the cognitive underpinnings of reading development as well as the relationship between reading difficulties and various aspects of language and other cognitive functions. It has generated numerous articles in refereed journals, in addition to a book, and numerous book chapters addressing the causes and correlates of reading difficulties in young children. Dr. Vellutino's most recent research seeks to develop models of early intervention that effectively reduce the number of children who continue to have long-term reading difficulties, and, thereby, further our understanding of reading development.

JOANNA WILLIAMS is Professor of Psychology and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. She holds an Ed.M. degree from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from Yale University. Her research interests include the processes involved in beginning reading and in comprehension and reading instruction for students with learning disabilities and other students at risk for school failure. In the late 1970s Dr. Williams developed a program to teach phonemic awareness to students with learning disabilities (The ABDs of Reading). Her work has explored differences in the comprehension patterns of normally-developing students and students with learning disabilities, and she has demonstrated a link between the editing difficulties during listening and reading (inability to inhibit competing associations) of students with learning disabilities and their comprehension performance. Recently she developed a program, The Theme Scheme, that helps children go beyond plot-level comprehension to a more abstract understanding of story themes and how they to a more abstract understanding of story themes and how they relate to real-life experiences. Dr. Williams has also been active in training and curriculum-development projects related to the professional development of teachers. She was editor of the Journal of Educational Psychology from 1973 to 1978, and she is the founding editor of Scientific Studies of Reading (1997- ). She was a member of the National Reading Panel. Currently she is on the Board of Directors of the Society for the Study of Scientific Reading, a member of the Expert Strategy Panel, U.S. Department of Education--Office of Special Education Programs, and a principal investigator in the Center on Accelerating School Learning.

RAND:

THOMAS K. GLENNAN, JR. (Ph.D., Economics, 1968, Stanford University) is a Senior Advisor for Education Policy in the Washington Office of RAND. His research at RAND has spanned a wide variety of policy planning issues in such diverse areas as education, manpower training, energy, environmental enforcement, demonstration program management in health and human services, and military research and development. Through 1997, he led RAND's analytic effort in support of the New American Schools Development Corporation and he is now writing a book on lessons learned from that program. He has also examined potential national and federal policies in support of the use of technology in elementary and secondary education. He is a coauthor of books on the management of research and development and the use of social experiments in policy planning. Dr. Glennan served as Director of Research and Acting Assistant Director of the Office of Economic Opportunity for Planning, Research and Evaluation before becoming the first Director of the National Institute of Education in 1972.

GINA SCHUYLER (M.A., Teaching, Trinity College; B.S., Policy and Management, Carnegie Mellon University; B.S., History and Policy, Carnegie Mellon University) is a Project Coordinator for RAND Education in the Washington, DC office. Schuyler's primary interests lie in K-12 education reform, serving at-risk students, and teacher quality. Her current projects include an evaluation of the Ford Foundation's Collaborating for Educational Reform Initiative, a study of 10-year strategies for programs of research for the Department of Education's Office of Educational Research and Improvement, and continuing work on an evaluation of New American Schools. Schuyler has also taught kindergarten and first grade in Washington, DC.

ANNE P. SWEET, currently at RAND on a half-time IPA, is with the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) where she focuses on research in reading and K-12 literacy. Dr. Sweet received her Ed.D. from the University of Virginia in clinical reading. As federal monitor for the Center for the Improvement of Early Reading Achievement (CIERA), she oversees field efforts to conduct research with an aim toward the improvement of practice. Dr. Sweet also conducts intramural research on literacy related issues. In addition, she works on interagency initiatives such as the IERI with NSF and NICHD, and the DELSS with OBEMLA and NICHD. Prior to joining OERI's Achievement Institute where she heads up a unit on teaching and learning, she was Director of the Learning and Instruction Division in OERI's Office of Research, and Director for Learning and Development in NIE's Program on Teaching and Learning. Preceding her tenure with the Department, Dr. Sweet was Associate Superintendent for Instruction in Virginia. Her research interests include cognitive and motivational aspects of reading achievement. She has taught reading and language arts, elementary through graduate school, and has served in various posts in public school administration and supervision. Dr. Sweet has edited a book, authored book chapters, and had articles appear in peer-reviewed research journals, most recently in the Journal of Educational Psychology (1998).

P. MICHAEL TIMPANE (M.A., History, Catholic University; Master's, Public Administration, Harvard University) is RAND's Senior Advisor for Education Policy. His assignments span the range of education policy, from pre-K to postgraduate studies, and emphasize the relationships among education and other realms of social and economic policy. Currently, he is leading RAND analyses of education vouchers and of the quality standards in educational research. As Vice President and Senior Scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching prior to joining RAND, Timpane was involved in developing all aspects of the Foundation's program and in his own research assessing the progress and problems of contemporary national education reform. He is Professor of Education and a former president of Teachers College, Columbia University, and has served as Dean of Teachers College and Deputy Director and Director of the federal government's National Institute of Education. He conducted research on educational policy at the Brookings Institution and at RAND in the 1970s; has served as Director of Education Policy Planning for the Department of Health, Education and Welfare; and has worked in the Department of Defense as a historian for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and as a special assistant for civil rights in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Manpower). Timpane has published numerous articles on education policy and has edited and contributed to several books on education and social policy. He has, for over two decades, helped direct the Aspen Institute's Program for Education in a Changing Society. Through this, and as advisor to state and federal policymakers, he has participated in the development of new perspectives on national goals and standards in education, comprehensive services for young children, higher education, youth policy, education and work, learning and technology, and the democratic purposes of schooling. Internationally, he has represented the U.S. in missions to the OECD, India, Iran, Israel, and the People's Republic of China; and has served as a visiting fellow for the Fulbright Commission in Italy, Austria, and Portugal, and as a Japan Society leadership fellow in Tokyo. He is a member of the Pew Forum on Education Reform, for which he recently organized and edited a volume of essays on higher education's involvement in precollegiate school reform. He serves on boards of the Children's Television Workshop, the Southern Education Foundation, and Jobs for the Future, and on the visiting committee of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He has also served on the boards of the American Council on Education and the American Association of Higher Education. He has received honorary doctorates from Wagner College and Catholic University.